In 1986 I was nineteen and, though still residing with my parents, was spending a lot of time with friends who’d moved in to their own places. Young people in those years were entitled to regular government cheques just for being out of work, even if they’d never had a job to begin with – “Unemployment Enjoyment” the program was nicknamed – and so our small Canadian city had a subculture of publicly subsidized dropouts, dreamers, and druggies, most of us just out of high school with no future agendas, or no futures at all. To paraphrase the philosopher Vincent Furnier, I was in the middle, without any plans; I was a boy and and I was a man. Anybody who’d secured a downtown apartment and welfare was thus an exemplar of independent adult living.

My good buddy Doug Davis was one such figure. He rented the upper floor of an old house just off the city’s main street, itself already transitioning from the bustling commercial hub of our childhoods to the dilapidated Rust Belt wasteland it remains today. Back then I frequently made the trek from my middle-class home to Doug’s little oasis of classic rock music, biker decor, and hash oil, where we spent long quiet hours in deep conversation and substance abuse. He had no phone, or a TV that I can recall, but he had a tape player, a turntable, and a downstairs landlord who sold dope, so he wanted for little. I was a regular guest at Doug’s all through the autumn of that year and into the winter, when the first snowstorms of the season swept over the Great Lakes and blanketed the sidewalks and back alleys of his neighborhood. The streets were silent and still on the cold night of December 25th, when I went over to celebrate the birth of Jesus with him by doing bottle tokes and listening to Ronnie James Dio.

Our mutual friend Dan was also there when I arrived; like Doug and me he’d earlier had Christmas dinner with his family before taking leave to go and party with his peers. I’m sure my own parents frowned upon my abandoning them for my wastrel pals at this of all times, but I was legally of age with no curfew, and it was the holidays, so what could anybody do? The three of us convened under a stark ceiling light and proceeded to talk, laugh, slap cassettes in the portable stereo, and inhale prodigiously, relishing the unsupervised privacy and the good fellowship that bonded us even in that smoky, shabby apartment, even in nonobservance of every Yuletide tradition. No wreath was hung, no tinseled tree stood in Doug’s home. We sang no carols, drank no egg nog, and I doubt if we even exchanged any gifts. It might have been any other winter evening when we sat around and got stoned in a sparsely furnished crash pad. But it was, nonetheless, a special occasion, a first venture into marking the festivities as we and not our elders chose. I wouldn’t choose this way again, but I had to choose this way at least once. For you, perhaps, memories of Decembers past are conjured up by hot chocolate and “O Holy Night.” For me, it’s hot knives and “Holy Diver.”

Many things have happened in the intervening years. For some time my home town has been beset with a crisis of addictions and overdoses, fueled by drugs far more dangerous than the cannabis products prevalent in my youth, while in 2023 a house on a block nearby to Doug’s old place was the scene of yet more “deaths of despair” that plague the North American heartland, a tragic mass slaying that made national headlines. And I’ve long since lost contact with Doug and Dan. But I wish them now, as we wished each other that bleak silent night in 1986, Merry Christmas.